


From The Ashes

by Zaxal



Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: Fix-It, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Resurrection, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-18
Updated: 2019-04-18
Packaged: 2020-01-15 21:45:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,663
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18507691
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zaxal/pseuds/Zaxal
Summary: A family can be a ragtag group of people determined to create a miracle.





	From The Ashes

Eliot is still in the infirmary when someone comes to update Margo. Through the haze of pain and blood loss and frankly amazing drugs, he can tell something hasn’t quite gone to plan. He’s all stitched up, guts inside him where they belong, and it’s probably going to scar. Even the best healers can’t erase all evidence of deep damage, and Margo tore through his abdominal muscles. The words ‘physical therapy’ have already floated through the air around him, and while it’s an annoying thought, it’s fine.

It’s going to be fine. He’s alive. Margo’s alive, if pissed off. He can tell from the way she stiffens, head tilted stubbornly up. Something’s upset her worse than Eliot nearly dying, which can’t be good.

“Bambi,” he croaks, voice weak.

There are no tears in her eyes when she looks at him. She comes to his side, and holds his hand in hers.

“You need to sleep, El.”

Eliot has enough presence of mind to know that it’s something that should concern him, but he hums, fingers curling around hers. “Compelling argument,” is what he tries to say, though he starts fading from consciousness too soon to know if he gets to the end of it.

————————————————————————

Eliot is sitting up only because the bed has him configured that way. He feels unclean despite the cleaning spells, despite the hospital gown.

Eliot doesn’t know when, exactly, he found out. He fell asleep in the infirmary blissfully unaware, then woke with the knowledge that the world had gone wrong. Part of him wants to ask what happened, but the details don’t really matter. Quentin is dead. Eliot, holding a gun over a year ago, blindly firing a god-killing bullet into the flesh prison of a monster, killed him. It was a slow death, a march towards the grave.

Self loathing has been a part of his DNA for as long as he can remember. This isn’t any different.

The first time he walks, it’s with one arm around Margo and the other around Penny. His steps are hesitant, and he hisses at the pain, almost stumbling if not for the two people holding him up.

Alice’s eyes are red; Eliot wishes he could tell her that he understands, that his world is empty, now, too. But it wouldn’t help her. It wouldn’t help him.

Julia can hardly look at him.

He knows she wishes she could trade them. Eliot can’t tell her that he wishes for that, too.

So many shared secrets, shared pain.

————————————————————————

“They’re going to have a bonfire memorial for him.” Margo sits on the edge of his bed and hands him the cigarette that’s already lit, and Eliot takes a drag even as pain courses from his midsection up. “You gonna go, or do you wanna stay in here and sulk?”

“Both,” he says with a failed attempt at a smile. She scowls at him.

“I need you to get me something. For him.”

There’s no one else in the infirmary. There’s no one else he trusts enough to tell. “I need a peach.”

“Of all the things in the world, you want to get him a goddamn peach?”

“Fifty years,” he answers after a moment, forcing himself to meet her eyes. “Fifty _years_ , and I fell in love with him. That was our—” His throat closes around the words, but he forces them out. “Our _thing_. Peaches and plums.”

“I’ll get you a peach,” Margo says, subdued. “But don’t lie to me. You were in love with him from the beginning.”

It strikes him, suddenly, that she’s right. His smile is… defeated. “When did you get so smart?”

“Around the time I overthrew the desert patriarchy.”

“Mm, haven’t heard that one yet.”

She shoves him lightly and steals the cigarette back from him. “Yes, you have.”

————————————————————————

The memorial is sweet and sad. Eliot watches the Fillory book in the fire next to the peach next to his crown next to an egg that no one else is questioning, so neither will he.

The song fades out, and for a moment, the company sits in silence broken only by the crackling of the fire.

Eliot takes a shaking breath, and his grip on his cane tightens. “This isn’t over.”

He says it so softly that only those nearest him hear it. Alice lifts her head, her eyes rimmed red.

Eliot watches the fire caressing memories of Quentin, and tears finally, for the first time, sting in his eyes.

He staggers to his feet, leaning heavily on his cane and hissing through his teeth. Margo moves to help him, but Alice is closer. Her arm loops around his, giving him someone to lean on. He lifts his eyes and repeats where they can all hear: “This isn’t over.”

“It seems pretty fuckin’ over,” Penny says. It’s fitting that it’s Penny, even if it’s 23 and not _their_ Penny. The moment needs a Devil’s Advocate, and Penny’s the perfect foil, on the other side of the fire, standing strong with Fogg and Margo.

Eliot’s whole body shakes as he jerks his head. “No. Q— he _never_ gave up. He had his weak moments, but when it came down to the wire, he always, _always_ believed in what we could do.”

“Quentin believed in magic,” Alice adds, her voice tight and pained. “He— Even after Plover, after everything he saw there, he believed in _Fillory_.”

That’s the first Eliot’s heard about that, and it pulls a grim smile onto his lips. Of course he did. Of course.

“You all united the Hedges, the Library, and Magicians to enforce those seals on the bottles. Group magic.”

“Yes, but I doubt you’re going to be able to unite even half of those to bring back someone they don't know,” Fogg says, somber.

Eliot can’t help but notice that he isn’t leaving them to this, that he hasn’t already said it’s impossible or that it shouldn’t be done.

His mad smile widens a tick. “We don’t have to. Some of us have been to the Underworld. Some of us have killed gods.” He glances down at Alice and nudges her lightly with the arm she’s holding. “Some of us were Niffins and saw almost all of the magic in the universe.”

She laughs a little and cries at the same time. Eliot understands. He lifts his head to look at them again. All of them, not a one truly opposed to what he’s saying. “Quentin would believe we could do it. So. We should.”

“What if we can’t?” Kady asks, picking up Penny’s role.

Julia’s the one who speaks, getting to her feet. “I’d rather try.” Her hands are shaking, clasped in front of her. “I can’t— I can’t even _do_ magic, and I’d rather do _anything_ than not try at all.”

Eliot looks at Margo, knowing that if she backs down, he’s lost all hope. She’s the only one capable of telling him ‘no’ when he’s truly hopeless.

But she looks back at him, embers caught in her eyes. “I say we get the nerd back.”

Penny nods. “Seconded.”

“I’m all in,” Julia says and looks to Kady almost the same way Eliot looked at Margo.

Kady reluctantly stands, “Yeah. I’m in. If we need someone to go to the Underworld — I’m on it.”

Alice squeezes Eliot’s arm. “For Q,” she says, voice a thin tremor.

Eliot, vindicated, stares at Fogg as if daring him to tell them no. He rolls his shoulders in a shrug. “When have I ever been able to stop any of you?”

“Never in, oh, 40 timelines, I would guess.”

————————————————————————

Josh and Fen are summoned from Fillory for the sake of having all hands on deck. Josh helps with morale by providing food and, apparently, kissing Margo, which Eliot finds himself smirking at until Margo heatedly whispers in his ear that she does _not_ want to hear it from him of all people. Fen has a strategic mind and a way of breaking through their collective habit of overcomplicating something to see the obvious solution in front of them. She's happy to see him, to hear that he's alive, but she knows that something has changed.

Julia shows them a spell she homebrewed when she was a Hedge. It’s a transportation spell that bypasses wards of all kinds and can pull, apparently, anything back with enough power and a vessel to put it in. It just needs someone to set the hook.

Kady volunteers immediately, just as they all suspected she would. Her body will be here, waiting for her. Quentin’s dissipated into atoms in the Mirror World.

Margo gets the supplies to make a new Golem, and Eliot and Alice begin the painful work of reconstructing Quentin from clay.

It’s easier, between the two of them, than expected.

“You really,” Alice hesitates on a break. “Really knew him, didn’t you?”

The word she didn’t say hangs in the air between them.

Eliot’s fingers curl around his cane. “I did.”

She brushes her hair behind her ear. “So— so did I.”

It’s not quite a negotiation. It can’t be, not when having Quentin back is still an abstract concept. After all, he deserves some say in the matter.

But it _is_ an agreement.

Margo, Penny, and Julia go to the Library. They don’t check the books, because, as they all know by now, they can be rewritten. Eliot won’t let some silly old _words_ tell him that this is an impossible task. No, rather, they seek out Zelda, whom they all assume has read their books. There are some vague warnings, and a promise that the Library in the Underworld won’t allow them to do what they intend to.

Eliot notices before it’s pointed out that Zelda failed to mention any measures of her own to stop them.

————————————————————————

The day comes like most of the days before it. Aches and pains and the penthouse full of people who are both too tired and too energetic for what’s about to come.

Eliot has been growing more and more restless. He doesn’t know what happens if this doesn’t work. There’s a chance that the spell fails, or Kady dies permanently and can’t find the way to the Library, or that Quentin doesn’t want to come back.

Eliot tries not to dwell on that, the thump of his cane audible on the smooth floors. The ritual is ready to start whenever they’re all ready.

Eliot has been ready since he woke up and knew in his gut that Quentin was dead.

————————————————————————

Hook, line, sinker.

————————————————————————

“Pull back!” Kady yells over her half of the Best Bitches necklace.

“You’re coming too, right?” Julia asks.

“Unless you leave me down here, yeah,” Kady says like it's obvious.

There was a time when she went silent. Eliot hopes she found her Penny. He hopes he talked her into living, though he has his suspicions for where this goes next. There’s peace between the Library and Hedgewitches. The Library needs Librarians. Library service continues after death. One plus one plus one equals… well, not _two_ which would be poetic, but Eliot’s rather more concentrated on the precise movements of his hands, the sweat beading on his brow.

The two bodies between them are ashen, lifeless.

Eliot wishes he’d heard Quentin’s voice, but he hopes to hear it every day of his life for as long as they both live. He hopes it’s the last thing he hears while he fades away into a restful sleep outside a cottage in Fillory, and he hopes it’s the first thing he hears in the Great Bowling Alley In The Sky or whatever the hell Julia was talking about when she described the Underworld to them.

All his energy is focused on this. On Quentin’s reconstructed body. He wants its heart to beat. He wants its lungs to breathe. He wants a miracle. Quentin has earned a miracle, and Eliot? Eliot would rip open the seams of the multiverse to give it to him.

Quentin, in a moment of madness, gave up hope in exchange for saving the world.

Eliot has resolved, ever since he stood before the fire, to hold onto hope enough for both of them. He’ll be the goddamn Wellspring of hope, the source of all faith and love that everyone else in the universe draws from if he can only perform this one act for himself and the man he loves.

Kady’s body seizes, air flooding into her lungs as she gasps, flails, systems coming back online. Julia and Fen are at her side in a moment, neither able to help cast but both willing to help in whatever way they can.

Eliot’s eyes remain resolutely on Quentin.

He’ll do this until his fingers break, until his arms go numb, until he dies of exhaustion or thirst or hunger or burns up from excess magic. Either Eliot’s body or magic will give in first, even if everyone else in the room abandoned him and the Golem and the ritual and left.

Quentin’s lips tremble, eyes moving behind their lids. Then, he bows back off the floor, drawing in a lungful of air so sharp it sounds like a scream. His eyes fly open as he gasps again and again, hands gnarled on the floor. Alice and Eliot are both staring at him and then look at each other as if asking permission to stop. Neither does. Penny is the first, rising from his spot to go to Quentin.

“Hey. Hey, take it easy.”

Quentin gapes and tries to speak and Eliot feels the twist in his gut, the anxiety that something is _wrong_ as his hands and fingers move frantically, desperately, forced when he wants nothing more than to drag his wretched body across the floor, sweep Quentin into his arms.

“I— I— I—”

Julia leaves Kady’s side to kneel next to Quentin. “Q?”

“Julia?” There’s wonder in his voice, and it breaks into a sound that could be either a laugh or a sob. “I th— think I’m having a panic attack—”

“You guys brought him back _with_ anxiety?” Kady demands, scrubbing her fingers through her hair as she sits up.

“I think it’s a sort of packaged deal,” Eliot snipes without thinking.

Quentin’s head whips around to look at him, and his eyes are brown. The color of earth, the gems on Eliot’s crown, the bark of the trees in their yard right after rain. The eyes he gave to Teddy, and Eliot can’t _breathe_.

“El?”

His hands falter, but the world doesn’t end. The spell dissipates, but Quentin is still there. In the hoodie and sweatpants they’d dressed him in, and he’s staring at Eliot and Eliot’s staring at him, and before he realizes it, he’s moving. He slips on the floor but Quentin is similarly struggling towards him, and they manage to meet in some kind of halfway point, arms flung around each other.

“Q,” he breathes, shuddering, tears pricking at his eyes. “There you are—”

“I’m here, you’re—”

“You _saved me_ —”

“And you all—?”

“I couldn’t— I _wasn’t_ going to go on in a world where I didn’t _try_ to get you back,” he says into Quentin’s hair, and Quentin smells like Quentin and Eliot can feel his tears on his shirt and his own aren’t going away and any illusions he had of pride are shattered when this is the only thing in the world that matters.

Quentin clings to him so hard that Eliot can imagine that he feels the rhythm of his heart, sprinting fast as he comes to terms with his renewed mortality, with his new life, before it starts to settle after long moments into the tempo that matches Eliot’s own.

In a moment, he’ll have to share. He’ll have to give credit to everyone else for following after him as he chased this mad dream with everything he had left in him.

But for this one moment, Quentin is _his_ again.


End file.
